Friendship means sharing a refrain, a semiotic set that allows us to see the same vision and helps us create a world out of chaos.[1]

Peer Sessions is proud to present Future Refrains, an exhibition at ASC Gallery featuring newly commissioned work funded by Arts Council England. Peer Sessions is a London-based nomadic crit group, established in 2009 by artists Kate Pickering and Charlotte Warne Thomas. Peer Sessions’ monthly meetings provide a forum for artists to come together to discuss and receive feedback on recent work in relation to current concerns in contemporary art and culture. In addition, we organise projects: workshops, exhibitions and residencies focusing on direct artistic collaboration.

For Future Refrains, Peer Sessions selected three member artists and invited each to choose a recent MA Fine Art graduate with whom to collaborate. Future Refrains will feature these three new commissions, alongside works from established artists Adam Chodzko and Lindsay Seers, who have each guest moderated recent Peer Sessions crit groups. As part of Future Refrains, a performance and screening day with live panel discussion, Collaboration in Question, on Saturday 23rd September will explore the processes and implications of collaborative practice for this project and in the wider world of contemporary art.

Peer Sessions derives its name from the double meaning of the word peer: both in terms of examining something in depth and referring to a group of equals – artists who have recently completed postgraduate education. Peer Sessions’ ethos is one of mutual support, extended through the practice of regularly gathering together, offering rigorous and reflective feedback and providing opportunities for experimentation and collaboration.

Future Refrains sets out to explore the potentials and limits of this mode of working together in the current socio-political climate. What claims, if any, can be made for collaborative artistic practice, beyond the direct benefit to the artists themselves? Future Refrains proposes that these emergent collaborations, in their inherent equality, mutuality and sharing, create a form of friendship that both refuses the individualism of neoliberalism and suggests tentative but potent models for future collectivity.

In Franco Bifo Berardi’s recent book Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, Berardi attempts to build a map of ‘social futurability’, to divine the possibilities and potentials of the social body in the wake of Daesh, Trump, austerity and resurgent social-nationalism. He considers the attack on modern social civilisation sustained by neo-liberalism as resulting in a kind of explosion of madness. Berardi contends that ‘the painful sentiment that things are flying away, the feeling of being overwhelmed by speed and noise and violence, of anxiety, panic, mental chaos’[2] results in a craving for (a non-existent) order, a need to build bridges between difference, between singular minds. In this building of bridges, Berardi proposes friendship serves to create shared meaning through dialogue:

The condition of the groundless construction of meaning is friendship. The only coherence of the world resides in sharing the act of projecting meaning: cooperation between agents of enunciation. When friendship dissolves, when solidarity is banned and individuals stay alone and face the darkness of matter in isolation, then reality turns back into chaos and the coherence of the social environment is reduced to the enforcement of the obsessional act of identification.[3]

Artistic collaboration has been broadly defined as encompassing a host of participatory, community based, interventionist and socially engaged practices[4]. Theorists Claire Bishop and Grant Kester have contested the competing political, ethical and aesthetic claims within these collaborative forms – Bishop attacking the approach of judging these works on a solely ethical basis (‘good’ forms of collaboration as opposed to exploitative/ ‘bad’) at the expense of aesthetic merit, whilst Kester affirms the ethical as a fundamental aspect of collaborative practice which enables artists to overcome their privileged status and to make work in a truly dialogic and participatory way[5]. Lindsay Seers, in her recent blogpost Collaboration is too fucked up- let’s CORROBORATE, provides a further variation on collaboration, considering that the employment of technicians and craftspeople to enable the realisation of her work is also a form of collaboration[6]. Taking the definition to its limits, Jessica Warboys in the exhibition The Studio and The Sea (Tate St. Ives), asserted she had collaborated with the sea by putting her canvas on it.[7]

In contrast, Future Refrains follows the tradition of direct artistic collaboration (Rubens and Brueghel, Dada, Gilbert and George, ULAY and Abramovich, Feschli and Weiss). It is therefore less mired in the problematic entanglements of working in unequal partnerships, or for monetary exchange, and rather than being a solely formal experiment, exists as a means of rejecting the romantic myth of the solitary genius. Instead, by fostering co-authorship, Future Refrains creates models of bridge-building through discussion and exchange between peers. These germinating collaborative structures are significant in the current climate of instability, anxiety and precarity in offering up an image of friendship as a stable framework to achieve common goals. Lindsay Seers advances the term corroborate as a more positive, nuanced alternative to collaborate. Circumventing the problematic associations of labour in the term collaborate (to ‘co-labour’), Seers states that to corroborate suggests “strengthening and arriving at truths through co-operation”. As part of this definition, she considers that corroborators:

seek for common truths between each other;
support these truths and reinforce them together;
strengthen in a group;
share a common goal in the collective but allow for differentiated outcomes;
are clear about their doubts even to each other and use criticism to consolidate and reinforce the group.

This working definition has served as a fruitful framework for this project, and holds within it a potential schema for future collective forms.

Future refrains will showcase collaborative commissions by:

Peer Sessions member Alicja Rogalska chose to work with Daniel Dressel

Peer Sessions member Anita Delaney chose to work with Simon Gerrard

Peer Sessions member James Ferris chose to work with Paula Linke

The exhibition will also feature new works by Adam Chodzko and Lindsay Seers who have contributed to recent Peer Sessions crit groups, along with Hayley Newman, as guest moderators.

Bold Tendencies is a not-for-profit creative enterprise and arts organisation that has been based in Peckham, South East London, since 2007 and is located on the disused top four floors of the municipal car park.

For the following years of its tenure on the car park site it is the intention of Bold Tendencies to undertake a cumulative commissioning programme and celebrate the site’s evolving function as a civic opportunity, allowing visitors to fully experience and appreciate the works installed, and to freely enjoy public space in the city.
Over a 10 year period Bold Tendencies - together with its partner projects, Frank’s Cafe and the award-winning resident Multi-Story Orchestra - has transformed its car park home through an annual commissioning programme of visual art, classical music (hosting Steve Reich for the BBC Proms in 2016), poetry and literature and pioneering architectural commissions including Frank’s, the Straw Auditorium, Simon Whybray's bubblegum pink West Staircase and Cooke Fawcett's Concert Wall. With immersive public spaces and spectacular views across London, the project has attracted more than one million visitors so far.

Alongside our arts commissioning programme we are expanding the footprint of Bold Tendencies outside our annual summer season. Over the last five years we have delivered many innovative education projects and community initiatives. Now gathered under a new charity Bold Everywhere, we continue to be heavily invested in the exciting spaces that lie between learning and play, education and enjoyment.

Cecilia Brunson Projects is proud to announce the opening of an exhibition of a unique and rarely seen early sound mural by Jesús Rafael Soto.

The exhibition will present the single large scale mural, Murale Panoramico Vibrante Sonoro, 1968. The mural will occupy the whole of the gallery space. The sound work represents a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice. It depicts the crucial point when he pushed his practice away from traditional confines of material and sought dematerialisation. This work represents a key moment, when the wall based Vibraciones works were freed from the two-dimension and then pushed into the free-standing Penetrables. It also marks the point where he liberated the concept of participation with the work.

Contemporary art is the art of participation. All men contribute to the artistic creation at the same time that the artist produces it. (Jesús Rafael Soto)

Uniquely amongst his free-standing murals, music is an integral element in this piece. When this mural is touched, the vibrations of the metal rods become sound and the piece becomes a sonorous work. The work will be accompanied by a film made to mark the mural’s first showing, depicting the exceptional sight of Soto interacting with and ‘playing’ his works, including this mural. The film also shows footage of Soto playing the guitar in front of the mural, as well as of him interacting with the elements of the piece.

In a later interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2005, Soto was to explain the importance of music to his practice. He saw in the relationship between musical notes a way of achieving true abstraction the notes don’t represent anything, but in fact constitute a system of unlimited relationships invented by man. In the same way, in order to achieve abstraction, I thought it was important to find a graphic system that would allow me to codify a reality rather than represent it. (Jesús Rafael Soto)

Free-standing murals were a key element of Soto’s practice. Over the course of his career, Soto was to make a number of murals. Two were commissioned in 1969 by UNESCO for their buildings in Paris. Several more commissions followed over the next decades, including two in Caracas, Venezuela: one in the Chacaíto metro station and the other on the ceiling of the Teatro Teresa Carreńo. Another work, Mur Panoramique Vibrant, was exhibited in the Venezuelan Pavilion in the 1966 Venice Biennale. What sets this mural apart from all of the others and makes it so special is the sound element.

The film ‘SOTO’, made in 1968, will be shown at the gallery during the exhibition.

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Jesús Rafael Soto (1923 – 2005)

Venezuelan artist Soto was a key figure in Twentieth Century Latin American art, and central to both the Kinetic and Op Art movements.

Major exhibitions of Soto’s work have taken place internationally, including Signals Gallery, London (1965); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1971); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1974); Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1979); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Caracas, Venezuela; Fundaçăo de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (1993). He was included in the Venice Biennale in 1968, 1966, 1964, 1958 and Documenta and the Săo Paulo Biennial in 1964.

Soto’s work is widely represented in numerous public and private collections around the world, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; MoMA, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Tate Gallery, London, among many others.

Gasworks presents Contra-Internet, a major new commission and the first institutional solo exhibition by London-based artist Zach Blas. The exhibition is commissioned by Gasworks; Art in General, New York; and MU, Eindhoven; and produced by Gasworks.

Contra-Internet at Gasworks marks the premiere of Jubilee 2033, a queer science fiction film installation that includes live action, CGI animation, blown glass sculptures and a single edition publication titled The End of the Internet (As We Knew It). Framed by existing works in animation, moving image and vinyl text, the exhibition confronts the growing hegemony of the internet.

A ‘neutral’ network during the 1980s and 90s, the internet is fast becoming the principle instrument of accelerated capitalism, surveillance and control: an infrastructure that it is increasingly difficult to imagine an outside of or alternative to. Counter to this, Contra-Internet appropriates queer and feminist approaches to technology and science fiction to reanimate the network’s more progressive past and speculate about forms of resistance to the internet of the present and near future.

Roughly based on the opening sequence of British filmmaker Derek Jarman’s seminal 1978 queer punk film Jubilee, Blas’s Jubilee 2033 (2017), starring Susanne Sachsse and Cassils, is set in the Silicon Valley of 2033. Known as the Silicon Zone, it is the imagined future of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand’s early thought, as advanced in her novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). Following decades of deregulation, the internet has become an omnipotent ‘internet of things’, defined by the principles of self-interest and laissez-faire that underpin Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.

This has given rise to an oppressive, neo-neoliberal, supra-state monopoly that polices the internet, which is indistinguishable from the world as everything falls apart. Flames encircle ransacked office buildings, riots abound, and the corpses of dead techies litter the streets. In the shadows of a vacant office building, however, the so-called anti-campus rises up. Led by their AI prophet Nootropix, eager students are taught history, politics, art and counter-infrastructure after the collapse of the internet. It is a philosophy against the legacy of Rand: contra-objectivism, contra-Californian ideology, contra-sexual, contra-internet.

In addition to this commission, existing works consider the present state of the internet, showing that the totalitarian network of Jubilee 2033 has in many ways already begun. A critical definition of the internet written by the artist is installed as vinyl lettering in a web-safe font; while Totality Studies (2015–17) comprises a triptych of animated .gifs that show 3D globes with stock images as their skins. These spinning icons demonstrate that recent popular imagery of the internet always seems to convey the same message: that it’s big, and it’s everywhere.

Resisting these and other visions of internet supremacy, three short, performative videos titled Inversion Practices (2016–17) utilise various conceptual-technical tactics to abandon and subvert the internet. These include strategies as diverse as erasing images of social media posts in Adobe Photoshop; plagiarising queer and radical economic theory to produce an anti-internet manifesto; and working with animators to model paranodal space (the space that exists in-between the various nodes of a network) as a way to visualise and think through what networks frustrate, obstruct or occlude as they are constituted.

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Contra-Internet is a project of Creative Capital, generously supported by Arts Council England; Cockayne–Grants for the Arts and the London Community Foundation; Thor Perplies; and Gasworks’ Exhibition Programme Supporter 2017-18, Catherine Petitgas.

The exhibition will be presented at Art in General, New York from January to March 2018 and at MU, Eindhoven from May to July 2018.

Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice confronts technologies of surveillance, security, and control with minoritarian politics. He is currently a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and has lectured and exhibited internationally, recently at IMA Brisbane, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and ICA Singapore.

We are excited to present to the public Morning Defeats an exhibition of new work by Marie Jacotey. The installation comprises some 30 drawings in dry pastel on Japanese paper, together with a large-scale work on fabric, measuring 3.5 x 10 m with drawings directly made on the surface with textile pens, crayons and dyes.

In all these new drawings we find extreme violence, rawness, brutality in combination with intimacy, sensuality, tenderness. These are the kinds of environments we have come to associate with Marie Jacotey’s work. It seems that for Marie the drawing offers up space for the setting of a tension, with its anchors either in relationships - be these specific or symbolic – or in the opposite experiences of loneliness and solitude.

There are many mediums (drawing, painting, sewing, printmaking) on and through which Marie Jacotey has imposed her preoccupations and messages. It puts in play a kind of system of correspondences where unexpected associations between elements set new light on each one of them. Marie’s perspectives – though insistently manual in their making – reference the world of cinema and slo-mo, the photographer’s point and shoot, identifying an artist who has come of age in the smartphone world with its prevalent verbs – zoom, scroll, tap, drag, swipe etc.

To date Marie has always used coloured pencil on paper or plaster blocks of varying sizes. She has worked on Japanese paper several times and its porous surface is an ideal recipient for dry pastel, giving rise to the velvet texture and vibrant colours in these works.

The audience will find a rush of different sources in the new drawings. In the landscapes alone is rural Normandy, the English Coast at Seven Sisters, Brighton, and Hastings, the grandeur of the Scottish Highlands and its remote seaside towns. Austere architectures of what seem to be sprawling prisons or asylums are a tangled combination of Mies Van der Rohe, Charles and Ray Eames, American Standard motels, even Alcatraz. All of this makes a loose scrapbook of real places, a combination of memories kept and photographs taken and saved.

Similarly, the repeated patterns of wallpapers, vases, textiles and other surfaces are a collage of influences, some with very definite sources (Ken Price, Guy Bourdin, Voysey demonstrate the variety) while others are the work of Marie’s imagination or derive from her absorption of images online. There are three clear series within the larger body of work - “tennis court”, “stained glass”, and “abstraction jubilatoire” - sub groups where Marie returns to a particular patterned iconography a number of times, creating free variations from maximum zoom. Marie has always been interested in abstraction and a clean break from pure figuration at times, she says, paradoxically helps her inform it. In the exhibition context, the combination of nonrepresentational works with narrative serves as a respiration between scenographies.

In this world of broken souvenirs, sleepless nights, horizons ahead burning, no last kiss, and a dawn loaded with fear, as one might imagine the portrait makes infrequent appearances. The exhibition however includes a few, and Marie’s only self-portrait to date. These particular drawings behave in the body of work - and in the show - like the small identity pictures we used to carry in our wallets of loved ones - stiff gazes lost in a void.

Alongside her own practice Marie has always sought out alliances in the worlds of architecture, fashion, poetry and other disciplines and from these have come an additional strand of her practice. Continuing Marie’s long-standing embrace of collaboration (she has made drawings for Assemble for their Turner Prize winning Granby Workshop project, she was commissioned by McQueen to make new works to complement their accessories, and by The Guardian Review for the front cover of their Saturday Supplement) the new pastel works have been specially mounted and framed for the exhibition by designers Soft Baroque.

The exhibition also coincides with the publication of Nights of Poor Sleep a collaborative publication between Marie Jacotey and poet Rachael Allen. The book is an extended series of responses and engagements between the two artists' work, showing a critical and creative engagement between the interconnected forms and processes of drawing and writing poetry. Treating image and text with equal weight, and illustrating how one informs and builds upon the other, Nights of Poor Sleep plays with traditional formats and contexts of reading/viewing, offering a fascinating and illuminating insight into the work of these two young female artists. Published by Test Centre in a limited edition run, and designed by Traven T. Croves, the book continues and expands Test Centre's engagement with interdisciplinary poetic practices and commitment to experimentation in poetry publishing.

Marie Jacotey (b. 1988 Paris) has exhibited her work internationally. This is her third solo show at the gallery here in London (following Everything I used to love about us is dead in 2015 and Dolly in 2014). She is working on her first animation Filles bleues / Peur blanche (Blue girls / White fear) written by Lola Halifa-Legrand. The animation won two awards at the Annecy Festival in June 2017 and will be produced by MIYU productions in 2018. She is also included with a newly commissioned work in Marcelle Joseph’s group exhibition You see me like a UFO (9 Sep through 7 October).

Matt’s Gallery is pleased to present Worst Gift, a new film installation by Marianna Simnett. Comprising video, liquid, light and sound, Worst Gift continues Simnett’s ongoing exploration of female subjectivity and bodily integrity as they relate to the power dynamics of the medical profession.
Worst Gift is set in an alternate world in which a voice surgeon (played by real-life surgeon and singer Dr Declan Costello) injects prepubescent boys with a substance to lower their voices. Shot in a Botox factory and theatrical surgery, the film follows a female protagonist (played by the artist) as she ventures on a mission to obtain the substance refused to her by the surgeon.

Needles are a central motif in Worst Gift. These ambiguous objects are desired and feared in equal measure; they evoke the violence of penetration and the possibility of healing, mosquito stings and surgeons’ cures. Worst Gift extends the needle motif into the physical space of the gallery. Arranged on the ceiling, hundreds of needles release drops of illuminated fluids in rhythmic counterpoint to the narrative unfolding on screen.

Worst Gift is a sequel to Simnett’s previous video work, The Needle and the Larynx (2016). In the earlier film, a surgeon injects the artist’s vocal cords with Botox. The physical changes the procedure brings (Simnett’s voice lowered in pitch as a result of the injection) triggers an exploration of infection, gender, perversion, desire, and illness. In Worst Gift, these themes are heightened and intensified. Simnett confronts the viewer with a fantastically strange yet viscerally affecting world.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a new whitebook, free to visitors and featuring a text by Charlie Fox.

1) In which Josella, who can still see, has been tied against her will by a blind man, and forced to guide him...
In which having been freed from this ordeal she returns home with Bill to find a scene of devastation.
In which both finally turn from shocked viewers and uncomprehending observers into active protagonists. Now, this is about survival.

2) Eva Wilkinson, James Bullimore and Ziad Nagy are each presenting new works and performance, related to their own practice, unrelated to the novel. I have not seen these works. As curator, I am that coercive blind man led by the seeing.

3) The imposition (or super imposition) of John Wyndham's narrative onto the artworks, that this text promotes, is a surplus reference to the exhibition itself. In so doing the text makes evident the potential -and the viability- of concurrent narratives: to paraphrase Bergman, an invitation to the audience to dispose freely of what is put at their disposal.

4) The novel was written a long time ago, a time of mounting global geopolitical tensions, of countries asserting their might through nuclear tests, of raging war in Korea and, with Operation Wetback, the US ramping up the mass repatriation of millions of Mexican people. The current context provides a grim scenography.

5) As goes the wizard's warning: 'Lochiel, Lochiel, beware of day! / For dark and despairing my sight I may seal, / But man cannot cover what god would reveal / 'tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, / and coming events cast their shadows before'.

6) Optimism prevails, as optimism wants to. We persist in believing our endeavours are a valid alternative to the socio-economic logic, when they might just be its validation. For a moment we fool ourselves that freedom gained is acquired for good. We change tack. We cut our wins. We make inconsistency our ally: breaking the continuum is the only modus operandi against intellectual death. This is about personal survival.

Rod Barton is excited to announce the solo show “Post-Celestial Compost,” opening September 14, from English painter Tom Howse. The exhibition includes a selection of recent paintings from the artist’s current practice.

When visiting the artist’s studio, a casual viewer may be forgiven for feeling that they have somehow stumbled down a twisted rabbit hole to a version of Wonderland that has been allowed to mature and grow unchecked since Alice’s escape back to reality. The artist himself states that he only seems to paint at a life size ratio. Subsequently, Howse’s compositions act as unsettled tableaus: wild vistas and twisted mischievous mirrors. The viewer does not look into realities constructed by Howse, rather they are absorbed into pre-existing universeswhere a UFO, household furniture, and anthropomorphic celestial bodies unquestionably coexistthat have their own universal rules and laws that seem out of place until experienced in person.

Howse’s aesthetic lends itself to the experimental and the otherworldly. His painting’s, whilst singular in their presentation, all belong to a shared visual vocabulary. Perspective is utilised via shifting flat planes, as opposed to a singular vanishing point, that allows for a feeling that of moving through a singular world. We subsequently cross through into a whole new universe at each plane of the paintings existence. The artist’s application of paint is rough without straying into the violent. Allowing for air bubbles, ephemeral studio matter and increasingly rough canvas surfaces, Howse plays with his surfaces with a more caring eye than visually aggressive painters. There is no feeling of attempting to viscerally assault a viewer, but instead an allusion to a subconscious, fluidic and instinctive process that invites translation onto the canvas. We know what we’re looking at, yet we cannot fathom the world in which it sits.

Tom Howse, born in Chester 1988, lives and works in London and has exhibited across Europe including Munich, Cologne and Oxford. Post-Celestial Compost will run between 14th September - 21st October 2017 at Rod Barton, 41-43 Consort Road, London.

THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWER is Wil Murray’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, presenting a new large-scale print series and exploring transformative mechanisms within the photographic process. The exhibition of these new works manifests itself as an experimental installation that uses light to further transform the works; the vitrine space acting as a large-scale camera.

Murray’s practice explores journeys as transformative mechanisms, exploring how meaning changes as an object moves from one point to another. He uses a hybrid of photography and painting to highlight the role of time and substance within this journey. In these new works Murray paints directly onto the photographic negative, allowing this mark to evolve, form and ‘black out’ within the process of exposure and development.

THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWER examines the geographic, historical and personal overlap between the trajectories of Hoffman’s Novelty Circus, a circus run by Murray’s family that toured each summer through Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia from 1933 to 1943, and the deployment of Japanese Fu-Go “balloon bombs”, over one hundred of which fell on the Canadian prairies between 1944 and 1945. The title of the series and exhibition is a quotation from Russell Hoban’s post nuclear-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker.

Each work, in the series of five, are Ditone Archival Pigment Prints and measure 175cm x 140cm cm. For this exhibition, the artist proof of each photograph will be installed in the unique vitrine gallery space and black paint strokes will be painted on the facing window. During the run of the exhibition, the works will be subjected to light. The arcs of the shadows of the black paint strokes moving across the works as the sun moves through the sky; shielding some sections from fading while exposing other sections to be altered by light. The exhibition space will be transformed into a camera and the photographs act as players in the exhibition-long performance, pushing Murray’s transformative process further and permanently altering the works composition.

THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWER will be exhibited at VITRINE following its first presentation at the 2017 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, at The Walter Phillips Gallery, at the The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, June – September 2017. Generously supported by The Canada Council for the Arts and The Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Group shows include: ‘A Journey from a sweeping gesture to a lasting effect’, VITRINE, Basel, CH (2016); ‘NOT A PHOTO’, The Hole, New York City, USA (2015); ‘Sought’ at Jarvis Hall Fine Art, Calgary, CA (2015); ‘Art in the Home 2’, Contemporary Arts Society, York, UK (2014); ‘The Combinational’, Studio 1.1, London (2014); ‘The Painting Project’, GALERIE DE L’UQAM in Montreal, CA (2013); ‘Made in Alberta Part IV’, The Art Gallery of Calgary, CA (2013); ‘XSTRACTION’, The Hole, New York, USA (2013) and ‘Broadcast, Funkhaus Nalepastrasse, Berline, DE (2012). His work was included in the Alberta Biennale in 2015 and 2107, he received an honourable mention in the prestigious RBC Canadian Painting Competition and his work was featured in the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art’s 2008 exhibition for national top-painters ‘Carte Blanche Vol. 2’. He had a solo booth in ‘Dialogues’ Art Projects, London Art Fair (2015) and has been shown with p|m Gallery at Papier Art Fair (2013); Art MRKT Fair (2013) and Art Toronto (2013/2015) and by VITRINE at The Manchester Contemporary (2013).

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VITRINE promotes a new model of exhibition-making. Exhibitions are viewable 24/7 through the glass from the public square.

For her first institutional solo exhibition in London, Katharina Grosse presents a new work, This Drove my Mother up the Wall, painted in situ at the South London Gallery.

Grosse’s large scale and site-specific works engulf both interior and exterior spaces, unhindered by the traditional boundaries of the pictorial field.

In the South London Gallery's main exhibition space, Grosse has made the void the dramatic centre of her project, masking the floor with a large foam stencil, then painting over it and the surrounding walls. Once she removes the stencil, a bright, white area of floor is revealed, untouched by the veils of colour and broad, propulsive marks spreading to all sides. This filtering technique is also evident in Grosse's recent canvas works, where stencils are placed over areas of the canvas at various stages of the painting process, resulting in chromatic layers that record her thoughts and actions.

To accompany the painted installation, Grosse has selected two documentary films to be screened in the first floor galleries, intended to frame her creative practice and research interests. In the short documentary from the series Women Artists (2016) by Claudia Müller, Grosse curates a fantasy exhibition by eight other female artists and discusses her selection of artists and artworks, the relationship between their practices, and guides the viewer through a virtual realisation of her ideal group exhibition.

The second documentary film is The Gleaners and I (2000), by Belgian director Agnčs Varda, a source of inspiration for Grosse's South London Gallery installation that deals with the marginal, the residual, and the invisible. Filming with a hand-held camera and narrating the film herself, Varda travelled around France, profiling gleaners, from those who follow the country harvests through to urban scavengers, such as the bricoleur artist who finds objects and transforms them into sculpture, and Varda herself, who ponders the gleaning nature of digital filmmaking.

Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiberg, Germany, and now lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been featured in international solo and group exhibitions, as well as major arts projects and biennales. Grosse’s most recent site-specific installations include Rockaway! for MoMA PS1’s “Rockaway!” program (2016) and Untitled Trumpet for the 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015). Notable solo exhibitions include “Constructions ŕ cru,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005); “Atoms Outside Eggs,” Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto (2007); “Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What's Your Name,” ARKEN—Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen (2009); “Two younger women come in and pull out a table,” De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, The Netherlands; “WUNDERBLOCK,” Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas both (2013); “yes no why later,” Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2015); and Museum Frieder Burda, Germany (2016).

Soul of a Nation shines a bright light on the vital contribution of Black artists to a dramatic period in American art and history

The show opens in 1963 at the height of the Civil Rights movement and its dreams of integration. In its wake emerged more militant calls for Black Power: a rallying cry for African American pride, autonomy and solidarity, drawing inspiration from newly independent African nations.

Artists responded to these times by provoking, confronting, and confounding expectations. Their momentum makes for an electrifying visual journey. Vibrant paintings, powerful murals, collage, photography, revolutionary clothing designs and sculptures made with Black hair, melted records, and tights – the variety of artworks reflects the many viewpoints of artists and collectives at work during these explosive times.

Some engage with legendary figures from the period, with paintings in homage to political leaders Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Angela Davis, musician John Coltrane and sporting hero Jack Johnson. Muhammad Ali is here in Andy Warhol’s famous painting.

Spanning the emergence of Black feminism, debates over the possibility of a unique Black aesthetic in photography, and including activist posters as well as purely abstract works, the exhibition asks how the concept of Black Art was promoted, contested and sometimes flatly rejected by artists across the United States.

With most of the 150 artworks on display in the UK for the first time, the exhibition introduces more than 50 exceptional American artists, including influential figures Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Lorraine O’Grady and Betye Saar, among numerous others. This landmark exhibition is a rare opportunity to see era-defining artworks that changed the face of art in America.

The Kabakovs are amongst the most celebrated artists of their generation, widely known for their large-scale installations and use of fictional personas. Critiquing the conventions of art history and drawing upon the visual culture of the former Soviet Union – from dreary communal apartments to propaganda art and its highly optimistic depictions of Soviet life – their work addresses universal ideas of utopia and fantasy; hope and fear.

The exhibition charts the Kabakovs’ incredible artistic journey, from the early paintings, drawings, albums and sculptural works made by Ilya working as an ‘unofficial’ artist in his Moscow studio from the 1960s, through to his move to New York in the late 1980s – a turning point which marked the beginning of his collaboration with Emilia on immersive and often large-scale installations. Including architectural models of realised and unrealised utopian projects and public sculptures, the exhibition demonstrates the breadth of the Kabakovs’ practice.

Three major and rarely exhibited ‘total’ installations will be presented together for the first time: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment 1985, Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album) 1990 and Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future 2001. Appearing as if they have been recently vacated, these uncanny environments draw spectators into the absurd and moving stories of these often fictional characters.

Coinciding with the centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the exhibition Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future explores the role of the artist in society in uncertain times.

…To sum up:
The way ahead is with Malevich alone.
But only a few will be taken – the best. Those whom the headmaster chooses – HE KNOWS WHOM.
Ilya Kabakov, ‘Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future’, A-YA, issue 5, 1983.
The exhibition is organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg and the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future is being presented in The Eyal Ofer Galleries, supported by Novatek, with additional support from Mr Roman Abramovich.